


Five Toys Wash Had on the Console Besides the Dinosaurs

by ghost_lingering



Category: Firefly
Genre: five things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-09-15
Updated: 2006-09-15
Packaged: 2017-10-03 12:10:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghost_lingering/pseuds/ghost_lingering





	Five Toys Wash Had on the Console Besides the Dinosaurs

1\. The first ship he ever worked on was a large clunky piece of _luh-suh_, but he was so eager to fly he pretended he didn't notice his younger cousins and his mother begging him to stay. The captain didn't let him pilot, not proper, as he was only hired to muck out the bathrooms, help some with the maintenance. He'd never been a real mechanic, not like Kaylee, but he was better then most men and he did okay keeping the ship running clean.

It was the days before the Alliance got control of the entire 'verse, and far before the war, though trouble was brewing even then. He didn't notice that much though, just walked through the long empty halls and sang sometimes, to himself. It was a slow job, but it got him in the air.

It was on his third week aboard that the night pilot saw him, told him to pull up a chair in the cockpit. Wash was worried about the captain seeing them, some, but after a few nights he relaxed, realizing that the captain didn't get up in the middle of the night for nothing but a space crash. He and the pilot-Jin Bell, they called him-talked about everything: women, the stars, the toy cars that Jin kept on the console, and, mostly, about flying.

When Jin retired, eventually, and made sure that the captain hired Wash in his place, he handed Wash a bag full of cars and said: "Washburn, don't you ever forget how it was you wanted to fly when you were a kid."

 

2\. Before Serenity he had been working on a charter ship, flying passengers to the outer rim. It was a low key job with decent pay, but once the first rush of Browncoats came out after the war, less and less people headed that way to settle. So the owner gradually closed shop and Wash was out of work.

But, still, for a good four years there was the charter ship, run by a captain who didn't much enter the cockpit, so didn't much care if Wash had marble shoots and spinning tops and floppy stuffed animals on the console, not so long as he didn't crash the ship into the broadside of a planet.

It made the cockpit the favorite spot for kids, the toys did, at least when they had kids aboard, and when Wash wasn't nicely kicking them out so that he could do his job. It wasn't just the kids who liked to visit the pilot though-almost all of the women (even the married ones with husbands who'd finally sent for them to come and join them) flirted, gave him cloth flowers in pots, picture frames "for his family", offered to shave his mustache. He didn't much notice those gifts though, didn't keep them around longer then it took to get back in the air again after dropping the passengers off.

Still, there were some gifts he kept, the ones from the children: a paper kite, a dreidel, a Jacob's latter. Or at least he mostly kept them, at least until new children came on the boat and he gave the toys away.

But there was one thing he hung on to for a good long while. It was the first gift he'd been given, a wooden horse and some toy men-cowboys and Indians, the child called them, like they had on Earth-that-was. Wash doesn't much remember interacting with that first kid, but he must have made an impression because the boy gave him the toys when he and his mother disembarked.

But when the operation was eventually shut down and he had to look for new work, he meet captain Reynolds, and Wash didn't much want to keep the cowboys and Indians anymore-for some reason it just didn't sit right, though he never cared to dwell on why.

 

3\. When they hired Kaylee he was just so relieved that someone on the boat actually smiled at him and didn't try to have sex in his cockpit that he didn't even care if she kept the ship in good repair. The first planet they stopped at after she came aboard he took her to a junk store to take her mind off missing her family, and bought two strings of lights that he could tell she was eyeing, but didn't have the money buy. He helped her hang them around her door (though, really, she's the one who did all the work, he just stood there trying to look helpful) and the cockpit, and didn't even mind when she finally convinced him to shave the mustache.

So it's only later, when the lights blew a circuit in the cockpit that left them stranded above a planet for three days, that he realized she was the best mechanic he'd ever worked with. Which was good because when Zoe cornered him and asked what he thought he was doing with a crew member and a girl half his age, he was honestly able to say that she was the best he'd ever worked with-and if they were friends it was only because the rest of the crew was too busy keeping a stern face to bother with pleasantries, or even polite conversation.

 

4\. Years later he still wasn't sure what made him buy the things. Kaylee was the only person who talked to him friendly, though there was some slow progress being made in the Zoe arena. Inara was still a mystery, as she was mostly gone on business all the time or snipping at Mal (though Kaylee told him that she was a real nice lady and, Wash had to admit, at least she would smile and say hello to him if they ran into each other on the ship). But he figured, three men on the ship and none of them talking to the others? There must be some kind of thing they could all find in common.

But when he got them Jayne just grunted and asked why he'd want to shoot water instead of bullets, and Mal said something about guns not being toys. Kaylee tried to smooth things over, but Jayne and Mal were having none of it, and Zoe, she wasn't saying anything at all. (And Inara was gone for two weeks on a planet, so she wasn't even around to look amused.)

So he forgot about them, tried to forget, and completely missed when they were gone from the compartment under the controls.

Later he'd come to think that it was those water guns that made him start to fall for Zoe, fall for her in more than "she's hot, but she could totally kill me" kind of way, because in the following days no one was safe, everyone soaked, and it took for Mal to catch her in the act of dousing Jayne that they figured out who was behind it. And after that it was a free for all: Jayne and Kaylee teamed up to get Mal, while Mal and Wash had a plan to get back at Zoe for all the times they got drenched before she was caught.

The water fights didn't actually last more than a few days, and after they were done, well, things went mostly back to normal-Wash talking to Kaylee, Kaylee talking to Wash, Jayne the man-ape cleaning his guns and grunting-but, even though he's fairly sure no one ever mentioned them again, that's what cinched it for him: this was the kind of ship that he could come to call home.

 

(5. The dinosaurs were a wedding present. "Most of my family died," she told him, "in the war, or before it, from sickness and in alliance cells. But my dad, he told me once, before he was gone, he told me a story about Earth-that-was, and how once when humanity lived there, there were giant reptiles who called it home. I always used to want to go to that planet: the one with the dinosaurs." So she gave him two gifts really: the lizards, and a glimpse of the girl that she hardly showed anyone.)

 

6\. After Inara left, and just as Book was starting to make motions in that direction, River began to spend her time in the extra chair beside Wash, looking at the stars.

"Space," she'd said once, "the unlimited or incalculably great three-dimensional realm or expanse in which all material objects are located and all events occur." She'd looked over at him them and added: "Somewhere in a different dimension there's a planet with dinosaurs."

Wash knew, intellectually, that she could read his mind, but looking at her, he always forgot, especially when she started to move the dinosaurs over the console and create dinosaur societies with them.

"It looks like you've got yourself a playmate," Zoe said once, half smiling.

He frowned. "Is she supposed to like dinosaurs? I thought that we were the only people on the ship who liked dinosaurs. And I was fairly certain that I was the only one who played with dinosaurs."

Zoe just shook her head, "Girl is odder than even you are."

It was only later, when Simon came looking for River and found her fast asleep and curled up in the chair that Wash thought to ask: "What kinds of toys does she like?"

Simon was confused, and half busy with figuring out whether to move River, how to it without waking her. "Matryoshka dolls," he said finally, as he lifted her out of the chair, "she used to have a whole set of them."

After Wash died, Zoe went through all of his things, methodically, carefully, deciding what to keep and what to throw away. It was only near the end of the job that she remembered the water guns and the compartment by the console. She went there, when she thought River was asleep. She liked the girl, but it still hurt to see someone else in that chair.

This is what she found: five small metal cars, the fancy colorful kind that people always talked about from Earth-that-was; a string of burnt out lights; two sets of nesting dolls-the first elaborately painted, smooth and probably expensive, and a second set, not so fine, ragged almost, like they'd been carved on some backwater planet.

She almost dropped them when River spoke behind her: "They fit inside each other's heads and bodies."

Zoe turned, facing River, who was in a nightshift with her hair pulled up on top of her head. River was doing that more and more, Zoe realized, and it made her look less like a young girl.

"Where'd they come from?"

River went and sat in the pilot's chair. "Simon told him," she said, "when I was sleeping here once remembering how to be a pilot." She ran her fingers along the switches and dials on the console. "I think he asked Book and Inara what they were, in the end-they look like Inara and Book-but it was Washburn who thought to get them."

"Why, what are they?" Zoe asked leaning against the wall.

"Toys-so I don't forget why I want to fly." River smiled, her face stretched out and split with it, and she made the chair spin and spin. "But I didn't want to put them out yet-it's too soon. I'd miss the dinosaurs."


End file.
